A beloved coach who guided the St. Thomas More Knights football team since 2000 passed away late Saturday evening. Bernie Kully was 41 when he succumbed to the esophageal cancer that was diagnosed in December.
Kully took a leave from coaching as well as his duties as a teacher and counsellor at the Burnaby Catholic high school to battle the disease, but he was never far from the sidelines.
After watching STM defeat the Centennial Centaurs 57-0 last Friday on his computer at home, he sent a congratulatory text to the Knights’ interim coach, Steve De Lazzari.
New Westminster Hyacks head coach Farhan Lalji said he and Kully, who graduated from STM in 1994, developed “a pretty good friendship” during the last couple of years. Even though the schools are two blocks apart, they connected at the 2015 Grey Cup in Winnipeg when Kully was visiting his former Simon Fraser University teammate Doug Brown, a former Winnipeg Blue Bomber stalwart from Port Moody who has become a fixture in the Manitoba capital.
“Ever since he’s been diagnosed we’ve texted quite a bit,” said Lalji. “He was a really, really good person. I’m glad I got to know him a little bit as well as I did before he passed. You get caught up in rivalries and everybody in high school football playing each other, but it’s a real tight-knit community.”
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